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SLEEPWALKER: ARENDT, THOUGHTLESSNESS, AND

THE QUESTION OF LITTLE EICHMANNS

Larry Busk

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”1

“Thinking…is political by implication”2

In 2005, a gale of controversy erupted over an essay penned by Ward Churchill, professor of

ethnic studies at The University of Colorado, entitled “Some People Push Back: Reflections on

the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” The essay, written on September 11th

2001 and expanded into

a book in 2003, concerns the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. In it, Churchill argues

that the attacks are best understood as a predictable response to American imperial practices; its

title is a reference to Malcolm X’s comment after the assassination of JFK—“the chickens have

finally come home to roost.”3 The (delayed)

4 controversy was not centered specifically around

these claims, however. Reactions to the essay focused exclusively on a single passage in which

Churchill characterizes some of the victims of 9/11 as “little Eichmanns,” referring to the

convicted Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, and, implicitly, to Hannah Arendt’s 1963 work

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (the term “little Eichmann” is

borrowed from John Zerzan,5 though its attribution to the WTC victims is original). In fact, as

Fritch et al. point out,6 virtually no commentator quoted anything from the piece except these

two words. The outrage and calumny that followed the exposure of the essay flowed directly

1 Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” in Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971), 435.

2 Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 192.

3 See Ward Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2003), 5.

4 For an account of why the reaction to the essay (and book) was so delayed, see Fritch et al, “Disingenuous

Controversy: Responses to Ward Churchill’s 9/11 Essay,” Argumentation and Advocacy 42 (Spring 2006): 190-205. 5 See Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, 33.

6 See Fritch et al., 195-196. They also point out that several critics and philosophers (Zizek, Chomsky) have made

arguments similar to Churchill’s, and suggest that the latter was singled out strictly because of the “little

Eichmanns” comment (192).

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from this incendiary comparison, from the suggestion that those who died in the World Trade

Center had any connection to the evil officer of the Third Reich. Churchill has since been

dismissed from his position at Colorado.

There have been several defenses of Churchill from the academic community. All that I

can find, however, defend only his right to free expression and not what he actually said. Just as

the indignant reactions to Churchill’s argument focus only on its sheer audacity and

offensiveness without analyzing any of the claims made, the defenses concern themselves

narrowly with the issues of academic freedom and open critical discourse, not risking an

examination of the content of the piece itself.7 This is what I attempt to do in what follows, to

consider both the motive and the implications of Churchill’s now infamous statement. Given the

tone of the backlash, one would think that he had only wanted to say something derogatory about

victims of terrorism. If this were the case, then why, given the wide range of possible libel, make

use of such a specific reference? What does it mean to be a little Eichmann? Since he is invoking

Arendt here, it will be necessary to ask this question in terms of her work. To understand what it

means to be a little Eichmann we must first understand what it means to be an Eichmann. Much

of the controversy—on both the indignant and defensive sides—stems from a misunderstanding

of Churchill’s comment and a failure to link it with Arendt’s thesis on the banality of evil. The

condemned remark turns on the connection, made by Arendt throughout her work, between

thinking and moral agency. This essay gives an account of that connection in order to understand

the origin and the significance of the contentious “little Eichmanns” assertion. It comes down, as

7 See:

Fritch et al.

C. Richard King, “Some Academics Try to Push Back: Ward Churchill, the War on Truth, and the Improbabilities of

Interruption,” in Critical Studies Critical Methodologies 9 (2009): 31-40.

Robert M. O’Neil, “Limits of Freedom: The Ward Churchill Case,” in Change (September/October 2006): 34-41.

Tim Simpson, “Editorial: Defending Ward Churchill,” in Political Theology 6.2 (2005): 149-152.

Ward Churchill, “The Myth of Academic Freedom,” in Social Text 90, vol. 25, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 17-39.

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we will see, to a question of the moral responsibility of thought—or, rather, the moral

responsibility of thoughtlessness. I will begin with an analysis of this theme as it appears in

Arendt, and move from there to discuss the substance of Churchill’s argument.

Early on in the Eichmann book, Arendt states what she understands to be the “moral

challenge” of the former Nazi’s trial in Jerusalem, one overlooked by the presiding authorities:

[The judges were unable to] admit that an average, “normal” person, neither feeble-minded nor

indoctrinated nor cynical, could be perfectly incapable of telling right from wrong. [The judges]

preferred to conclude from his occasional lies that he was a liar—and missed the greatest moral,

even legal challenge of the whole case. Their cases rested on the assumption that the defendant,

like all “normal persons,” must have been aware of the criminal nature of his acts, and Eichmann

was indeed normal insofar as he was “no exception within the Nazi regime.” However, under the

conditions of the Third Reich only “exceptions” could be expected to react “normally.”8

In Eichmann, Arendt did not find a passionate anti-Semite, a criminal mastermind, or a sneering

cartoonish maniac.9 He “was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther

from his mind than to determine with Richard III, ‘to prove a villain’.”10

She found instead a

markedly ordinary and mediocre bureaucrat, whom “half a dozen psychiatrists had certified” as

“normal”11

and who “was incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.”12

This

does not mean that Eichmann was not evil or that he did not deserve the death sentence

eventually handed him. It is this key point about Arendt’s famous thesis of “the banality of evil”

that was so misunderstood by many contemporary readers and even some today.13

The claim is

not that evil is banal “it itself,” or that the Third Reich and the Holocaust were boring or

8 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 26-27.

9 “His was obviously also no case of insane hatred of Jews, of fanatical anti-Semitism or indoctrination of any kind.”

Ibid, 26. 10

Ibid, 287. 11

Ibid, 25. 12

Ibid, 48. 13

For an account of these reactions, see Richard I. Cohen, “A Generation’s Response to Eichmann in Jerusalem,” in

Hannah Arendt in Jerusalem, ed. Steven E. Aschheim (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 253-277.

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unremarkable affairs.14

The implication is that, in certain situations, average and entirely

mundane people can become complicit in acts of disquieting horror.15

It is the fact that Eichmann

was “normal,” that was he was “no exception,” and yet still unquestionably and profoundly evil,

that Arendt finds unsettling: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like

him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly

and terrifyingly normal […] this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put

together.”16

Of course, Eichmann was not on trial for his mediocrity, and normality cannot be “more

terrifying than all the atrocities put together” simply by virtue of being normality. He was hanged

not because he was banal, but because of his central role in the deportation of millions of people

to camps of extermination, which, though never his idea, he carried out with diligence and

precision. Arendt no doubt understands this. What worries her is the relationship between the

former (banality) and the latter (evil). It is the realization, represented and symbolized by the

Eichmann trial, that an explicit and fanatical malice—Iago’s scheming or Richard III’s desire to

“prove a villain”—is not a necessary condition for the orchestration of mass atrocities. But it is

obvious that normality (or banality) by itself is not linked to evil; it would be inconceivable to

suggest that being average or unremarkable as such could lead to moral depravity. To establish

her basic thesis about the Eichmann trial, Arendt requires the additional category of

14

There has been much scholarship on the question of the relationship between the “banality of evil” thesis in

Eichmann and Arendt’s discussion of “radical evil” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a question left aside in these

reflections. For an interesting take (and a nice summary of the debate so far), see Paul Formosa, “Is radical evil

banal? Is banal evil radical?” in Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (2007): 717-735. 15

Seyla Benhabib: “The phrase the ‘banality of evil’ was meant to refer to a specific quality of mind and character

of the doer himself, but neither to the deeds nor to the principles behind those deeds.” See “Arendt’s Eichmann in

Jerusalem,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, ed. Dana Villa (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2000), 74. 16

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 276.

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thoughtlessness, which she is careful (here and later)17

to distinguish from stupidity:

“[Eichmann] was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness—something by no means identical

with stupidity—that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.”18

Because Eichmann was not a passionate devotee of Nazi ideology, and because his

mediocrity is by no means enough to account for his behavior, the question of how this humdrum

and cliché-prone pencil-pusher became so integral to “the bureaucracy of murder”19

must be

addressed in terms of his (dis)inclination to think. In the context of certain political situations, it

is this condition—the condition of thoughtlessness—that enables “normal” people to become

complicit in horrors and atrocities. It would be entirely different, and Arendt’s suggestion would

make no sense, if everyone under the Third Reich had been a ferocious Nazi zealot, an Iago or

Richard III. This notion is refuted not only by the existence of Eichmann, but by the fact that, as

Arendt has it above, “so many were like him.”20

It is indeed quite common in informal

conversation about the Reich and the Holocaust to assume that responsibility lies with a few

patent lunatics who by ill-fortune happened to rise to power (Hitler, Goebbels, Heydrich, etc.).

Forgotten by such talk is an old truism: it takes a nation. In this context, Arendt suggests, it took

a nation characterized by thoughtlessness. This is the dark historical and political reality that she

confronts with her thesis on banality—“the strange interdependence of thoughtlessness and

evil.”21

17

“Inability to think is not stupidity; it can be found in highly intelligent people, and wickedness is hardly its cause,

if only because thoughtlessness as well as stupidity are much more frequent phenomena than wickedness. The

trouble is precisely that no wicked heart, a relatively rare phenomena, is necessary to cause great evil.” Arendt,

“Thinking and Moral Considerations,” 423. 18

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 287-288. 19

Ibid, 172. 20

She points elsewhere in the book to “the almost ubiquitous complicity, which had stretched far beyond the ranks

of Party membership.” Ibid, 18. 21

Ibid, 288.

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It will be asked at this point exactly what Arendt means by “thinking” and

“thoughtlessness.” There is no explicit theoretical discussion of this question in the book on

Eichmann. The theme makes its appearance in her work, however, at least as early as The

Human Condition, where she writes in the preface: “[T]houghtlessness—the heedless

recklessness or hopeless confusion or complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become

trivial and empty—seems to me among the outstanding characteristics of our time.”22

Two things

are important in this passage. The first is the (admittedly brief) definition of thoughtlessness,

particularly the third clause about “complacent repetition” of “trivial and empty” ‘truths’ (recall

Eichmann’s clichés). The second is Arendt’s claim that thoughtlessness—the same

thoughtlessness that defined Eichmann—is not only prevalent in “our time,” but is one of its

“outstanding characteristics.” This suggests that, in analyzing the “banality of evil” encountered

at the Eichmann trial, Arendt is not only concerned with a particularly dark (but closed) chapter

in the history of Western civilization (die Nazizeit, as the Germans say), but with an affliction

that remains with us today. The banality thesis thus represents a present problem with potential

consequences as morally and politically momentous as they were during the Third Reich. She

invokes such terms again in On Violence with regard to “scientifically minded” government

officials dealing in weapons of mass destruction: “The trouble is not that they are cold-blooded

enough to ‘think the unthinkable,’ but that they do not think.”23

But for a thorough elaboration of

Arendt’s conceptions of thinking and thoughtlessness, we must turn to The Life of the Mind.24

The first volume of Arendt’s (would-be) three-volume final work is devoted to

“thinking.” The introduction reveals that the project was undertaken at least partially as an

22

Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 5. 23

Arendt, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt: 1970), 6. 24

Much of what went into the key chapters of The Life of the Mind first appeared in “Thinking and Moral

Considerations.”

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elaboration of a point she had only gestured toward and hinted at in Eichmann in Jerusalem. I

will quote this passage at length:

The immediate impulse [for writing the book] came from my attending the Eichmann trial in

Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of “the banality of evil.” Behind the phrase, I held no thesis

or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our tradition of

thought—literary, theological, or philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have

learned, is something demonic […Iago…] However, what I was confronted with was utterly

different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest shallowness in the doer that

made it impossible to trace the uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or

motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—

was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no sign in him

of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one

could detect in his past behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police examination

was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.25

In order to understand how the phenomenon of Eichmann was possible—how the “manifest

shallowness” of his character related to the “uncontestable evil” of his actions—Arendt attempts

an analysis of the faculty of thinking, and, more importantly for her purposes (and ours), its

connection with moral responsibility. The “strange interdependence” alluded to in the Eichmann

book now appears in the form of a question: “Is wickedness, however we may define it, this

being ‘determined to prove a villain,’ not a necessary condition for evil-doing? Might the

problem of good and evil, our faculty for telling right from wrong, be connected with our faculty

of thought?”26

The suggestion is not that thinking will necessarily lead to right action, but that

thoughtlessness alone is sufficient to vouchsafe evil behavior—no kakia required. If she is

correct in her hypothesis, then thinking and thoughtlessness emerge as moral categories: “If…the

ability to tell right from wrong should turn out to have anything to do with the ability to think,

then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise from every sane person, no matter how erudite or

ignorant, intelligent or stupid, he may happen to be.”27

It is the insistence on the moral

dimension of thinking that sets Arendt’s work apart from the endlessly repeated trite platitude

25

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 3-4. 26

Ibid, 4-5. 27

Ibid, 13.

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that ‘critical thinking is important.’ Thinking is not merely a healthy exercise to keep the mind

sharp, but a moral imperative that we must “be able to demand”; this means, likewise, that those

whose lives are characterized by thoughtlessness are morally culpable as such, even if they are

not wearing the S.S. uniform of Eichmann. This theme recalls Adorno’s famous remark from

Minima Moralia that “intelligence is a moral category,”28

though for Arendt, as we have seen,

thinking is not the same as intelligence; one may be extraordinarily intelligent without ever

“thinking.” But we still have yet to give an account of what she means by this word.

Throughout the first volume of The Life of the Mind, Arendt considers various answers to

the question “why think?” She is skeptical of both the traditional philosophic (i.e., Platonic)

notion that thinking can reveal some fundamental truth or reality and the stoic perspective that

thinking could help us cope with the difficulties of life. Her answer comes in the figure of

Socrates, and it is in her discussion of Socratic method that her conception of “thinking”

emerges. In sum, thinking is the inquisitive, critical examination of well-entrenched and well-

assumed values, concepts, mores, and behaviors. Socrates is the key figure for Arendt because,

the Plato/Socrates problem aside, he does not attempt to come to any definite conclusion, to

build an elaborate theory, or to settle questions by arriving at certain answers; his virtue as a

thinker is the same as his virtue as a “gadfly”—to perturb, perplex, and leave his interlocutor in

aporia. It is this negative, doubt-raising quality of thinking that interests Arendt:

[T]hinking inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values,

measurements of good and evil, in short, on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in

morals and ethics. These frozen thoughts, Socrates seems to say, come so handily that you can

use them in your sleep; but if the wind of thinking, which I shall now stir in you, has shaken you

from your sleep and made you fully awake and alive, then you will see that you have nothing in

your grasp but perplexities, and the best we can do with them is share them with each other.29

28

Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E.F. N. Jephcott (New York: Verso, 2005), 197. 29

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 174-175.

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The “frozen thoughts” that are undermined by thinking are thereby left without certified

foundations and are not replaced by others. It is not the vocation of thinking, Arendt suggests, to

conceive of new “criteria, values, measurements of good and evil, customs and rules of conduct”

but to question the “established” ones. She realizes, of course, that to do this constantly would be

overwhelming and bewildering such that one could never act. She likewise never advocates

isolated introspection, a “worldless” reflection that removes itself with finality from its

surroundings, a retreat inward; her work is something of a testament to the contrary. But while

she does not offer any crude quotas or ultimatums (‘one must think for two hours each week’),

her discussion of thinking is meant to illustrate its fundamental moral and political importance,

which becomes clear when she turns to consider its opposite.

Thoughtlessness, for Arendt, is characterized by a blind conformism that never critically

confronts its surroundings, its ideology, or its value system. It is a kind of obstinate complacency

clinging to an unreflective set of norms:

[N]on-thinking...by shielding people from the dangers of examination…teaches them to hold fast

to whatever the prescribed rules of conduct may be at a given time in a given society. What

people then get used to is less the content of the rules, a close examination of which would

always lead them into perplexity, than the possession of rules under which to subsume

particulars.30

The sense of thinking as “dangerous” is important here. Its danger lies in its ability to divest

people of their “prescribed rules of conduct” along with the facile justifications that accompany

them. It disrupts the “complacent repetition of ‘truths’ which have become trivial and empty.”

Thoughtlessness refuses to confront this danger. The thoughtless person, then, is one for whom

these trivial and empty truths represent a bounded horizon, one who “holds fast” to the

“prescribed rules” of their given time and society, one who has not been shaken from sleep by

“the wind of thought.” Again and again Arendt analogizes thinking and thoughtlessness with

30

Ibid, 177.

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waking life and sleep, respectively, carrying the analogy so far as to claim that thinking is the

very essence of life and that thoughtlessness is something like a living death:

Thinking accompanies life and is itself the de-materialized quintessence of being alive; and since

life is a process, its quintessence can only lie in the actual thinking process and not in any solid

results or specific thoughts. A life without thinking is quite possible; it then fails to develop its

own essence—it is not merely meaningless; it is not fully alive. Unthinking men are like

sleepwalkers.31

The moral and political dimensions of thinking are encapsulated in this startling simile.

Thoughtlessness is akin to sleepwalking, i.e., to performing actions without self awareness,

reflection, or meaning. And, as Eichmann’s thoughtless banality revealed so forcefully, this kind

of somnambulism is by no means innocuous or neutral, either morally or politically. For it was

sleepwalking, and not diabolical passion, that conditioned Eichmann to become “a mass

murderer who had never killed.”32

Thinking in Arendt’s sense becomes momentous in those

times and places where thoughtlessness is the norm, when the danger to conformity and

complacency represented by Socrates the gadfly is resisted or ignored altogether:

When everybody is swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else does and believes in, those

who think are drawn out of hiding because their refusal to join in is conspicuous and thereby

becomes a kind of action. In such emergencies, it turns out that the purging component of

thinking (Socrates’ midwifery, which brings out the implications of unexamined opinions and

thereby destroys them—values, doctrines, theories, and even convictions) is political by

implication.33

It is the ability of thinking to wrest us from our “sleepwalking” that Arendt finds so politically

important, and it is the consequences of political actions that makes the thinking activity—so

markedly absent in the likes of Eichmann—a moral imperative that must be demanded from

everyone.

31

Ibid, 191. See also: “The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of

being alive. Without the breath of life the human body is a corpse; without thinking the human mind is dead.” Ibid,

123. 32

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 215. 33

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 192.

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Before moving on to discuss Churchill, it is necessary to respond to a couple of

objections raised by Richard J. Bernstein, who questions Arendt’s association of thinking and

moral agency. First, he criticizes Arendt for not giving an “adequate” account of the relationship

between thought and morality: “Arendt desperately wants to show that thinking does have moral

consequences—at least ‘indirectly’…But although she asserts this categorically, she never gives

us adequate reasons to show this connection.”34

She furthermore fails to give an “account of

why…some persons lose or show no signs of the ability to think and (a few) others still maintain

their ability to judge.”35

I would simply ask what kind of “account” would be satisfactory for

Bernstein. In her book on the Eichmann trial, Arendt spends much time elaborating the banality

that she takes to be characteristic of the defendant, and in an attempt to understand how such a

mediocre character could orchestrate such monstrous deeds, she develops in The Life of the Mind

an analysis of how thoughtlessness could—and, in the case of those like Eichmann, did—

engender morally reprehensible actions. Thoughtlessness alone suffices; kakia is not a necessary

condition for evildoing. Given the scope of her claim (that thinking and thoughtlessness, because

of their potential consequences, have moral and political implications), I would say that an

adequate account has been given. As for the question of why some people show no signs of

thinking while others do, this is neither here nor there for the claim at hand. It is not Arendt’s (or

any moral theorist’s) task to explain why some people behave morally while others fail to.

Bernstein’s second objection concerns what we might call ‘the Heidegger problem.’ If

there is such a connection between thinking and moral action, how could Heidegger, who no

doubt thought, have been such a complicit fellow-traveler with the Third Reich? Bernstein

writes: “At the very least, the example of Heidegger should make us stop and think whether there

34

Richard J. Bernstein, “‘The Banality of Evil’ Reconsidered,” in Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics, ed.

Craig Calhoun and John McGowan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 313-314. 35

Ibid, 317.

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really is any ‘intrinsic’ connection between thinking and evil.”36

He takes special note of the fact

that Arendt published “Thinking and Moral Considerations” around the same time as her

laudatory “Martin Heidegger at Eighty.” This objection, however, only stands insofar as we

ascribe to Arendt the claim that thinking will by necessity lead to right action, and this would be

a false ascription. She explicitly denies that thinking could ever “produce” a moral action on its

own accord.37

There is likewise nothing to suggest that she holds the position that one may do

the right thing only if one thinks Socratically. Her claim that thinking and thoughtlessness have

political consequences and are thus moral categories does not commit her to the view that

thinking is either a necessary or sufficient condition for moral deeds. Therefore, Heidegger’s

complicity as such does not pose a problem for Arendt’s claim about the connection between

thinking and morality.38

Having given an account of the stakes of Arendt’s perspective on banality,

thoughtlessness, and moral responsibility, I turn now to discuss Churchill’s anathematized article

and its infamous comparison. Strangely enough, the uproar over Churchill’s piece mirrors the

uproar over Arendt’s book; in both cases, an attempt to understand the perspective being offered

was secondary to a reflexive indignation at the rhetoric used (death threats are common to both

cases also). Many objected to the phrase “banality of evil” without pausing to reflect on the

meaning or the gravity of the claim being made, and much the same thing has happened with

36

Bernstein, “Arendt on thinking,” in Villa (2000), 290. The Heidegger problem also shows up in “‘The Banality of

Evil’ Reconsidered,” 312-318. 37

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 5. 38

Dana Villa has an interesting take on ‘the Heidegger problem.’ She argues that “Arendt’s ‘defense’ of Heidegger

is, in fact, an attack on philosophy and the activity of thinking in its pure unadulterated form. She wants not to

excuse Heidegger or defend philosophy so much as to reveal what George Kateb has called the ‘strange alliance’

between thoughtlessness and philosophy.” See “The Banality of Philosophy: Arendt on Heidegger and Eichmann,”

in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 181. For

another source that indicates that Arendt’s relationship to Heidegger was more complex than Bernstein assumes, see

Arendt, “Heidegger the Fox,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2000),

543-544.

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Churchill’s “little Eichmanns” remark. Given a serious reading, it becomes clear that the essay is

not a defense or a justification of the events of September 11th

, but a call to understand terrorist

attacks against the United States in the context of American practices worldwide. He gives

various (but by no means exhaustive) examples: the aerial bombing of Iraq during the Gulf War

that killed many civilians (and left many others to starve to death due to damaged infrastructure),

support for the Israeli oppression of Palestine, the overthrow of democratically elected leaders in

Guatemala (and elsewhere in Central and South America) and their replacement with murderous

but capital-friendly dictators, and complicity with Indonesian-led massacres in East Timor. In

each case, strategic or economic interests took precedence over the value of human lives, let

alone any ideals about “freedom” and “democracy.” Each case also represents an instance of the

global hegemonic power of the United States, a power intent ensuring its own enrichment and

domination rather than peace and prosperity for all. It becomes very difficult, given these facts,

to understand a terrorist attack directed against the U.S. as an evil, violent force impinging upon

a beacon of liberty and righteousness. This point does not necessarily entail an apology for any

given terrorist action.

This perspective does, however, raise questions about the millions of people who

explicitly or implicitly support the American empire without being directly involved in acts of

violence. Churchill, completely incredulous to appeals to ignorance, paints a dismal picture:

Claims that American “didn’t know” what was being perpetrated in their name are…rather less

than credible. Americans by-and-large greeted [news of genocide] with yawns and blank stares,

returning their attention almost immediately to what they considered far weightier matters: the

Dow Jones and American League batting averages, for instance, or pursuit of the perfect

cappuccino. Braying like donkeys into their eternal cell-phones, they went right on arranging

their stock transfers and real estate deals and dinner dates, conducting business as usual, never

exhibiting so much as a collective flicker of concern.39

39

Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting Chickens, 6. I quote here from the expanded version of the essay published

in book form. The original is: “Some People Push Back: Reflections on the Justice of Roosting Chickens,” in

Pockets of Resistance 27 (September 2001).

14

Though one might take issue with some of the magniloquence used here, it would be a moot

point to deny the basic thrust of the claim being made. There are certainly activists and

intellectuals who point out and object to America’s violent empire, but these are certainly the

exception rather than the rule; Churchill speaks of the populace “by and large,” not universally.

Whether or not they are “braying like donkeys” into “eternal cell phones,” we must admit the

absence of a visible culture of dissent on the level of American neoliberal capitalist hegemony.

The ideology that the United States stands for truth, justice, and liberty, that it is ‘the greatest

nation on earth,’ and that it only engages in violence to protect and ensure freedom for all, is

much more firmly rooted than any critical confrontation with its actual practices, the dogmatic

belief system that sustains these practices, or its history.40

The distinction between the right and

the left in the United States (“conservatives” vs. “liberals”) means little in this regard.

The matter becomes more serious when this ideology translates into an active

participation in the apparatuses of empire, and it is in this context that Churchill makes his

scandalous comparison:

A decided majority of those killed in the WTC attack might be more accurately viewed as “little

Eichmanns”—that is, as a cadre of faceless bureaucrats and technical experts who had willingly

(and profitably) harnessed themselves to the task [of] making America’s genocidal world order

hum with maximal efficiency—than as “innocents.”41

Notice that he does not label every victim of the terrorist attacks in this way, only those he

considers integral in some sense to the bureaucracy of America’s global empire. Now, that such

people represent a “decided majority” of 9/11’s victims cannot be more than speculation.

Churchill does not seem to consider those working in the buildings in service capacities, or those

who happened to be on the planes (who, for all we know, were revolutionary activists). These

40

Hence Arendt’s remark that “Every intellectual [in the United States] is a member of the opposition simply

because he is an intellectual.” See “That ‘Infinitely Complex Red-tape Existence’: From a Letter to Karl Jaspers,” in

The Portable Hannah Arendt, 27. 41

Churchill, On The Justice of Roosting Chickens, 19.

15

reservations granted, the referents of the term “little Eichmann” are clear enough: those who had

contributed, if only in minor functionary ways, to “America’s genocidal world order.”

Even granting everything Churchill has said about American empire and about some of

the 9/11 victims’ bureaucratic complicity with it, one might still object to his insensitivity.

Thousands of people lost loved ones in these attacks, and, no matter what the moral standing of

the person lost, it is unacceptable to disrupt a grieving process with such flippant defamation.

Churchill’s response to this point is easy to anticipate: Who is shedding tears for the Iraqi

children left without food or water by aerial bombing? For the East Timorese? For Salvador

Allende and his cabinet? What is “insensitive” is American citizens carrying on business as usual

even as tremendous bloodshed is perpetrated in their name. What is “flippant” is to act as though

we Americans are the “good guys” and that we only mete out violence in the name of justice.

The essential point lying beyond Churchill’s remark is not a claim about any particular person

among the three thousand or so victims of the attacks, but a perspective on the role of the United

States in the world order. The crux of it is not to disavow someone of mourning the loss of a

friend, or to claim that those killed “deserved it” (keep in mind that he nowhere defends the

attacks), but to enjoin us to seriously rethink the interpretation of these events according to which

an evil force intruded upon a just society of “innocents.” Perhaps the remark remains

unnecessarily cruel and ill-timed; my concern is that, in countenancing this, we throw the baby

out with the bathwater. The WTC attacks represent an act of terrorism, but the United States is

the terrorist nation par excellence. Our collective failure to recognize this, Churchill thinks, is

tantamount to mass delusion: “Why should ‘they’ hate ‘us’? The very question is on its face

absurd, delusional, revealing of an aggregate detachment from reality so virulent in its

16

evasiveness as to be deemed clinically pathological.”42

One cannot help but be reminded of

Arendt’s description of one of the central organizing principles of totalitarian regimes: “[A]

general training in supreme contempt for all facts and all reality.”43

It would nevertheless be a mistake to characterize the “almost ubiquitous complicity” of

the American people with a violent empire—even the complicity of those more integral to its

operations—as wickedness, kakia, or a kind a diabolical scheming. Many are loving parents,

generous friends, ‘nice people,’ etc. The fact that such practices of global terrorism continue

virtually unquestioned and unspoken, and the fact that an overwhelming majority subscribes to a

mystifying ideology that either explains away these practices or simply denies them, point to a

mass social phenomenon that can only be called sleepwalking. Arendt wrote in the 1950’s that

“thoughtlessness” was “among the most outstanding characteristics of our time,” and it is as true

now as it was then.44

Most Americans are “swept away unthinkingly by what everybody else

does and believes in,” avoiding “the dangers of examination” by “holding fast to prescribed rules

of conduct” while an empire of violence consolidates its power behind their backs and under

their noses.45

Just as in the Eichmann case, the animating factor in the perpetuation of this empire

42

Ibid, 13. 43

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Orlando: Harvest Books, 1968), 385. 44

In his classic study of “American anti-intellectualism,” Richard Hofstadter argues that the present form of this

phenomenon manifests itself as an implicit distinction between “intelligence” and “intellect,” where the former is

valued and the latter is denigrated. Intelligence involves a practical, predictable manipulation for some narrow,

immediate end, while intellect is “critical, creative, and contemplative.” In other words: “Whereas intelligence seeks

to grasp, manipulate, re-order, adjust, intellect examines, ponders, wonders, theorizes, criticizes, imagines.

Intelligence will seize the immediate meaning in a situation and evaluate it. Intellect evaluates evaluations, and

looks for the meanings of situations as a whole.” See Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1966), 25. It should be noticed that Hofstadter’s “intellect” sounds quite a bit like Arendt’s “thinking.” 45

For a remarkable reflection on the role of the American philosopher in the context of American empire, see John

Lysaker, “Essaying America: A Declaration of Independence,” in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 26, no. 3

(2012): 531-553. Lysaker also has an insightful piece on thoughtlessness in higher education. See “Life Takes Visa,”

in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22, no. 2 (2008): 71-81.

17

is not (in most instances) a malicious villainy, but an unwillingness, as Arendt puts it, “to think

what we are doing.”46

The thoughtlessness and banality that characterized Eichmann had disastrous moral and

political consequences. An altogether similar disinclination for thinking characterizes the

American majority, and its consequences are no less dire. That the United States is not doing

precisely what the Nazis did does not change the fact that it represents an empire of violent

coercion maintaining itself in plain view of a seemingly oblivious populace. And if thinking and

thoughtlessness are moral categories, then all those who thoughtlessly reinforce this particular

way of life are morally culpable as such. Even if one is not actively campaigning on behalf of

this empire, and even if one is a ‘nice person,’ the role of the uncritical fellow-traveler is enough,

given the impact of this, to confer responsibility. As Arendt has it: “Politics is not like the

nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.”47

In certain situations, as she took pains

to show with the example of Eichmann, normality is no guarantee against evil. Churchill’s

evocation of her thesis on banality in connection with such ‘normal people’ thus becomes

comprehensible,48

and we must at this point come before the question of collective guilt, mass

guilt, mass evil. We are forced to conclude that all of the innocuous, thoughtless goers-along—

Arendt’s “sleepwalkers”—are not so innocuous after all. These unreflective people—the

majority, to be sure—are, then, to some extent “evil,” and Churchill’s labeling some particularly

involved ones “little Eichmanns” is not without warrant, even if his particular attribution should

have been more carefully qualified and better timed. The full import of his remarks only

46

Arendt, The Human Condition, 5. 47

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 279. 48

He refers to the banality thesis specifically as a “devastating insight.” This comes in the context of his discussion

of “postmodern liberals” who excuse their complicity in American empire by reference to “objective structures.” He

writes: “The parallels between this ‘cutting edge’ conception and the defense mounted by postwar Germans—

including the Nazis at Nuremberg—are as eerie as they are obvious.” Churchill, On the Justice of Roosting

Chickens, 19-20.

18

becomes clear when we consider, reading Arendt, what Eichmann really represents: “That such

remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil

instincts taken together…that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem.”49

It is

evidently a lesson we have yet to take to heart.

There is a line in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard that will carry us to our conclusion:

“You don’t yell at a sleepwalker…he may fall and break his neck.”50

If we look beyond the

shock value of the words used, and connect it with Arendt’s theses on morality and banality, then

what Churchill’s essay represents is a call to thinking in an age of thoughtlessness, as well as a

bitter, incendiary denunciation of the thoughtless themselves along with those who would excuse

such behavior as “neutral” or “innocuous.” With his bombastic exposure of collective guilt, he is

shouting at the sleepwalkers to wake up—“The burden must be made still more irksome by

awakening a consciousness of it, and shame must be made more shameful still by rendering it

public.”51

The vitriolic reaction to the piece confirms Wilder’s protagonist: sleepwalkers do not

like to be shouted at, to be shaken from their sleep; there is a very concrete danger that in the

confusion they will collapse from disorientation and loss of equilibrium. To bring the metaphor

back down: the guilty do not like to be told that they are guilty; the responsible cannot continue

their present course of life if they are made to feel responsible. Once again, there is an analogy to

be made here with something Arendt wrote, this time concerning the post-war years:

The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of

authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The

normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite

risky—not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career.52

49

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 288. 50

Charles Brackett, D.M. Marshman Jr., and Billy Wilder, Sunset Boulevard (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures,

1950). 51

Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” trans. Joseph J. O’Malley,

in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 56. 52

Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 251.

19

The risk involved in indignation is obviously a lesson Churchill has learned well. The fact that,

despite all that has happened, he has refused to retract or apologize for the essay, indicates that

he has remembered another lesson from Arendt, one that we must bear in mind as we move

forward in thinking about the problems raised here: “Better to be at odds with the whole world

than be at odds with the only one you are forced to live together with when you have left

company behind.”53

53

Arendt, The Life of the Mind, 188.

20

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